The processing of documents such as for example, bank checks, includes the sorting, distribution, and proving of all deposit transactions arising from the commercial operations of a bank. The sorting of checks includes separating the checks in accordance with the bank the check is drawn on. Further processing of bank checks includes the imprinting of the transaction amount of the check directly on the check for confirming such amount. Modern document processing systems provide for the listing and balancing of amounts for use in proving the documents, encoding information on the checks for use in distributing the checks, endorsing, microfilming, sorting, and distributing the checks in accordance with their final destination. Magnetic printing and readers have been employed, together with optical character recognition devices for processing bank checks to reduce processing costs as well as for reducing errors during processing.
Typically, bank checks processed utilizing present technology require manual encoding of the transaction amount of the check in magnetic ink on the check. Various systems have been proposed for reading handwritten characters of the courtesy amount field on a bank check. While such recognition systems generally have proved to be workable, the variations in the handwritten characters of all customers of a bank result in high recognition error rates and therefore, the manual encoding of such transaction amounts is frequently done resulting in lower recognition error rates.
A need has thus arisen for the method and apparatus for reducing the costs of processing certain documents such as, for example, bank checks in which the handwritten transaction amount can be automatically read at low recognition error rates for subsequent processing of the document.